iSuppli: SSD Energy Savings Could Power A Nation

We've always heard that solid state drives really were better for the environment (and your power bill), but evidently we've grossly underestimated just how much less power these things consume compared to traditional HDDs. Or either this report is just glorifying the numbers, one. According to new research from iSuppli, the use of SSDs could allow "the world’s data centers to reduce their cumulative electricity consumption by 166,643 Megawatt Hours (MWH) from 2008 to 2013."


So, just how significant is that? We're told that the energy savings is enough to "power an entire country," though details beyond that aren't provided. "SSDs potentially could replace 10 percent of the high-end and high-RPM Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) used in data centers that are ‘short stroked,’ i.e. they are used for very rapid reads and writes of transaction data coming into these drives at fast speeds, rather for storage capacity," explained Krishna Chander, senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli. "Each of these 15,000 RPM Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) drives draws about 14 Watts during the day. SSDs, on the other hand, draw about half the power of these HDDs, at an estimated 7 Watts. A 50 percent savings in power consumption is a noticeable improvement, so even a small penetration of SSDs in enterprise data centers could result in massive power savings."


Of course, this "research" relies heavily on things that aren't yet fact. For instance, they have no idea how many users and data centers really will make the switch to SSDs, but at least we know just how much better off we'd be if SSDs did take over. In a perfect world, right?